In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy hills of the Atacama Desert below, but the darkness suited Bretherton just fine. The researcher wasn’t going sightseeing. Seated directly behind the pilots, he kept his focus entirely on the sky. The plane was stuffed with instruments, and its wings bristled… Source In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-13...

My oldest son is 11. He'll be starting high school in September, and my wife and I want a way of keeping in touch with him as he'll be making his own way to school. The default here would be to get him a phone, but like most 11-year-old boys, he's an idiot and we don't trust him with one. So, as a test we've lent him an old phone of mine to see if he can be trusted with one under some limitations: The phone never leaves the kitchen. He only gets an hour of screen time a day between 09:...

I try to limit my time on stage these days, but one exception this year is at DDD Europe . I’ve been involved in Domain-Driven Design , since its very earliest days, having the good fortune to be a sounding board for Eric Evans when he wrote his seminal book. It’ll be fun to be around the folks who continue to develop these ideas, which I think will probably be even more important in the AI-enabled age.  ❄                ❄                ❄    ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stefano Verna, whose blog can be found at squeaki.sh . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Neil Gorman and the other 117 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I...

“When in doubt, follow your nose.” ― The Lord of the Rings After staying in Auckland for three nights, it was time for a road trip on the north island of New Zealand! Driving in New Zealand Signs often remind drivers to use the correct side of the road I felt prepared for my journey, but there was one thing I was concerned about: driving on the "wrong" side of the road. I prefer to travel by train or bus whenever possible, but in New Zealand, it would have been too limit...

I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB. Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors can be used with other SBCs and computers too, if you buy an M.2 version . I run Friga...

Computer Science Professor Joseph Halpern passed away on Friday after a long battle with cancer. He was a leader in the mathematical reasoning about knowledge. His paper with Yoram Moses,  Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment , received both the 1997 Gödel Prize and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize . Halpern also co-authored a  comprehensive book on the topic . Halpern helped create a model of knowledge representation which consisted of a set of states of the world, and eac...

I introduced Showboat a week ago - my CLI tool that helps coding agents create Markdown documents that demonstrate the code that they have created. I've been finding new ways to use it on a daily basis, and I've just released two new tools to help get the best out of the Showboat pattern. Chartroom is a CLI charting tool that works well with Showboat, and datasette-showboat lets Showboat's new remote publishing feature incrementally push documents to a Datasette instance. Showboat r...

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. Start with these if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a ...

Jo and I are trading blog post titles. The title Jo chose for me is “A perfect day.” What would my perfect day look like? Reflecting on this question, I started to think about the days that have brought me the most joy in the past. I realised that the days that stick out in my memory as being really good were all unique. I had so much fun at the Eras tour. I have loved my days spent in art galleries (and the memories of wishing for just one more hour). This made me think about how I'm no...

A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again. Higher production volume means larger, more efficient factories. It means more opportunities to use dedicated, high-speed, continuous process production equipment, or to implement efficiency-improving methods like Design for Manufacturing o...

My tongue-in-cheek post about not needing a 3D printer got me thinking of other things I definitely don’t need. An all-flash homelab server. Goodbye seek times, massive inflow current on power up, and large, heavy cases! But I also have those aforementioned hard drives and they work just fine with the appropriate ZFS tuning and an SSD L2ARC. A jar of flags . Clara and I started collecting those little flags you get from tourist trap shops in places we visit, but it’s current...

I just found this one HUNDRED questions webmaster questionnaire ! I'll just pick a few I feel like answering right now, thanks. Read more on the site… I just found this one HUNDRED questions webmaster questionnaire ! I'll just pick a few I feel like answering right now, thanks. Read more on the site… I just found this one HUNDRED questions webmaster questionnaire ! I'll just pick a few I feel like answering right now, thanks. one HUNDRED questions webmaster questionnaire Read ...

There’s a tournament coming  this summer. Lord Whent is hosting it, from his seat at Harrenhal, the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms.  It looks to be a grand event, Rhaegar Targaren will be on hand, the Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne.   The Starks are coming down from Winterfell, Eddard and his brothers Brandon and Benjen and their lovely sister Lyanna.  Her betrothed will also be on hand; Robert Baratheon, the young Lord of Storm’s End.   Howland Reed of Grey...

The entire ecosystem around Claude Code is pretty confusing, the naming conventions are a mess and the pace of change is beyond any production tool I've seen. However Skills are probably the most misused. I see it at work at ton but a paper just came up on Hacker News: SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to ...

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The first half of this note is basically battle scars from the wrapper, and the second half is basically “don’t do React”. PlayBook is a web app that can run in any browser, but we use it inside a special wrapper iPad app. The iPad app captures finger motions, pencil strokes, and other physical inputs with higher fidelity than the browser APIs allow, forwarding these inputs to a web view running PlayBook. This hybrid gives us the richness and capability of a native app with the portab...

WASHINGTON (February 19, 2026) – Shield AI, in partnership with the Navy’s Strike Planning and Execution (PMA-281) and Aerial Targets (PMA-208) programs , successfully demonstrated Hivemind, its AI-enabled mission autonomy software, autonomously flying two Navy BQM-177A aircraft during a December flight test at Point Mugu Sea Range in California. The flight served as the capstone event of a multi-month integration and test campaign and followed an initial August demonstration , during ...

Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Last year I wrote a blog post about building a data processing pipeline using DuckDB to ingest weather sensor data from the UK’s Environment Agency . The pipeline was based around a set of SQL scripts, and whilst it used important data engineering practices like data modelling, it sidestepped the elephant in the room for code-based pipelines: dbt. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Last year I wr...

* Not official. I was working on my slide deck for the upcoming State of the Browser conference and ran into what I would classify as a recurring issue: HTML needs a logo. There isn’t a broadly accepted official logo for (version-independent) HTML. There is a logo for HTML 5, but that versioned marketing term has long fallen out of regular use (and was introduced 18 years ago). This is a community solved problem in both the CSS and JavaScript spaces! CSS: , relevant discussion on...

Hey all, I hope you're doing well. I'm going to be on medical leave until early April. If you are a sponsor , then you can join the Discord for me to post occasional updates in real time. I'm gonna be in the hospital for at least a week as of the day of this post. I have a bunch of things queued up both at work and on this blog. Please do share them when you see them cross your feeds, I hope that they'll be as useful as my posts normally are. I'm under a fair bit of stress...

Hey all, I'm sure you've all been aware that things have been slowing down a little with Anubis development, and I want to apologize for that. A lot has been going on in my life lately (my blog will have a post out on Friday with more information), and as a result I haven't really had the energy to work on Anubis in publicly visible ways. There are things going on behind the scenes, but nothing is really shippable yet, sorry! I've also been feeling some burnout in the wake of...

Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find the man pages hard to navigate to get the information I want. Lately I’ve wondering – could the man page itself have an amazing cheat sheet in it? What might make a man page easier ...